Friday, 30 October 2015

Greek Theatre and the Suffragettes

Two
things made this week’s topic inevitable.
Last week’s blog photo of Edythe Olive in the 1907 votes-for-women
production of Euripides’ Medea attracted
several emails, and I saw Sarah Gavron’s movie Suffragette. It passes with flying colours my basic test for
cinema, being both entertaining and enlightening.

Actresses Franchise League

I
would have enjoyed seeing Bonham Carter and Mulligan recite the Euripidean Medea’s
first monologue ‘Women of Corinth’, on the economic, social, and political
wrongs committed against the entire female sex. Suffragists regularly did so at
their meetings, in the translation of Gilbert Murray. The autumn of 1907, when Harley
Granville Barker directed Medea at the Savoy Theatre, saw the first mass
arrests of women activists, whose supporters noisily packed the stalls to applaud
what they perceived to be a militantly feminist ancient play.

McCarthy as Dionysos

The
Actresses’ Franchise League was formed in 1908. One of the most articulate
members, Lillah McCarthy, determined not to let a man get the best part,
starred as a cross-dressed Dionysos in Euripides’ Bacchae in 1908. She followed this up with a searing performance as
Jocasta in Sophocles’ Oedipus in 1910
and as the spunky heroine of Euripides’ Iphigenia
in Tauris in 1912-1915.

When
Gertrude Kingston became the lessee of the Little Theatre in the Adelphi in
1908, she knew about Greek drama because she had acted the role of Helen in the
1905 pro-Boer Trojan Women directed
by Granville Barker. She was personally more interested in the photo
opportunities afforded by glamorous Hellenic robes than by politics, but she
still chose a radical feminist and gay rights campaigner, Laurence Housman
(A.E. Housman’s brother), to translate Aristophanes’ Lysistrata for her company.

Laurence Housman

Laurence
saw his opportunity, however. He had co-founded the Men’s League for Women’s
Suffrage (which does get a mention in the movie) in 1907. He saw Lysistrata
as a ‘play of feminist propaganda which offered lurid
possibilities’, and a vehicle for jokes about women’s exclusion from the
suffrage.

Kingston as Lysistrata

McCarthy as Jocassta

Six
months later Kingston also directed a scene from the play as part of a matinée
organized at the Aldwych by the Actresses’ Franchise League and the Women
Writers Suffrage League; the performance was enhanced by ‘carefully planned
typical interruptions from the audience’, similar to the audience participation
which had enlivened the performances of Elizabeth Robins’s suffragette drama Votes
for Women! The Woman’s Press published Housman’s translation (1911); American suffrage groups also performed it.

Iphigenia in T

So
the craze for Greek theatre currently sweeping London’s theatreland is by no
means without precedent: I just wish that I could see any serious political
ideals or agendas underpinning any of the productions on offer...